Marrakech is a city in the grip of a delirious imagination. A feverish dreamscape of honeycombed alleys and minarets quivering in the moonlight and haunted by the restless creatures of a visionary carnival that has lasted for a thousand years and shows no sign of stopping now.

Marrakech is one of the world’s enchanted places where time becomes suspended and, through its open door, you catch a glimpse of the past so rich and so remote and yet so palpable. You can sense the atavism propelling every trick and turn in the Djemaa El Fna, Marrakech’s pulsating main square and one of the world’s great theatres : spectacular pageant of singers, tumblers, sorcerers, herbalists, story tellers, impostors, preachers and snake charmers, all competing for your eye. There is nowhere else in Africa which so effortlessly involves you, blows aside travel cynicism and keeps you returning. If you get tired, observe the spectacle from one of the overlooking rooftop cafes.

There is also a modern Marrakech of luxury hotels, streets with restless mopeds and guides, but they all seem to co-exist with the past. It is a Berber rather than Arab city; the traditional metropolis of Atlas tribes, Maghrebis from the plains, Saharan nomads and slaves from beyond the desert.

It was founded around 1062 by Youssef Ben Tachfine of the Almoravide dynasty, but it was his son Ali Ben Youssef who brought architects and craftsmen from Cordoba to build palaces, baths and Mosques, a subterranean water and in 1126 the first circuit of walls were raised from “tabia”- the red mud of the plains.